Aerospace Expertise

Grinding of power plant components has always been making great demands on grinding technology, because of the stock removal characteristics of materials like Inconel, Nimonic und WASP alloy. These are known as highly long-chipping and therefore tend to clog the grinding wheel’s topography.

In general, two grinding technologies – and with it two kinds of abrasives are used:

• CD-Grinding (Continuous Dressing)
  Typical for this method is continuous dressing: chips getting caught in the bond are removed before next contact with the component.
  The CD method is known as extremely high-wear on grinding wheels as well as on dressing tools. In grinding wheels, less costly cutting materials are used (aluminium oxide (Al₂O₃) or silicium carbide (SiC).
• Grinding with intermittent dressing
  In this method, dressing of a constant dressing amount is required according to a given number of ground components. More and more often, grinding wheels with superabrasive materials cBN and diamonds are used.
  In both techniques, the wheels are dressed with diamond roller dressers.

For these fields of applications, Saint-Gobain Abrasives offers a wide range of well-matched products, ensuring reproducible and low-tolerance results. Our dedicated sales engineers gladly help you find your most favourable solution. Optimizing of existing work processes as well as development of new applications - Saint-Gobain takes pride in continuously working on development of new technical solutions for the industrial customers’ specific requirements.

Let us inspire you with our technological expertise and the comprehensive resources of our global organization.
Contact our WINTER sales engineer – your excellent partner:

Vitrified@Saint-Gobain.com oder Joerg.Fuhlendorf@Saint-Gobain.com

Turbine components like blades or combustor cases consist of unhardened long chipping materials like Inconel, Nimonic or WASP alloy.

These materials are extremely wear intensive on the layer of grinding wheels. Accordingly, requirements are high towards the specifications of the layers.

Due to the loss of profile accuracy, conventional grinding wheels are often used with CD grinding (CD: continuous dressing whilst grinding).

The permanent dressing process consequently makes frequent changes of the grinding wheel necessary.

In addition the dressing tools have an extremely high wear, too.

Because of the high wear, the use of grinding tools with superabrasives (diamond, cubic Boron Nitride (=cBN)) is not recommended in combination with the CD grinding process.< /U>

Due to the much better profile retention, these tools do not need to be dressed continuously.

Especially vitrified bonded cBN grinding tools are increasingly used in this field of application.